Against the Silent World

I refuse to accept visible reality as the final word.

As a child, perhaps six years old, I sometimes imagined that everything around me was a dream—not merely individual events, but the whole of life: the people, the things, the spaces and the time through which we move.

This idea has stayed with me. It is not an article of faith. It is a restlessness from which my painting emerges.

I paint from the suspicion that reality extends deeper than its visible surface.

Why does what belongs together appear separate?

Perhaps matter, energy, space and time are not ultimately separate. Perhaps they appear to us as different realities only because we exist within them.

We cannot take up a vantage point outside our universe. Our existence and our perception remain bound to space and time. We therefore experience reality only from one place, from one perspective and at one particular moment.

We experience what belongs together as separate because we can never view the whole from outside.

Perhaps it is not reality that is divided, but our access to it.

We see bodies in space. We experience change in time. We distinguish between that which endures and that which acts. We call the one matter and the other energy. Yet perhaps these are merely different manifestations of a connection that we are unable to perceive as a whole.

Perhaps separation is not the opposite of unity, but the form in which unity appears to us.

Painting Resists Separation

A painting begins as a surface.

Upon this surface, figures and intervals, nearness and distance, light and darkness, bodies and movement emerge. What initially lies side by side joins to form a world.

The surface remains a surface and yet opens into space. The painting reveals its construction while simultaneously creating illusion. We know that we are looking at forms and colours, yet we experience bodies, gazes, spaces and events.

For me, the illusion of space is not a mere deception. It is the moment in which the visible surface brings forth a reality that is not materially present and yet is experienced as present.

Here, for me, lies the mystery of painting.

Painting does not simply depict reality. It repeats the process by which reality itself might come into appearance:

The painting is matter beginning to dream.

In the Painting, Succession Becomes Simultaneity

We live in time and therefore experience the world in succession. One moment displaces the one before it. One view follows another. Memory, presence and expectation remain separate from one another.

The painting can break through this order. On a single surface, different moments, perspectives and realities can appear simultaneously. Outer and inner worlds, memory and presence, observation and imagination can overlap.

Painting does not abolish time. But for a moment, it can transform succession into simultaneity.

Comic and Cubism Are Language, Not Content

For me, this is the significance of comic-cubist and cubist devices. They are not the content of my art. They are a language through which the limitation to a single view and a single moment can be overcome.

Comic gives me the freedom to transform, condense and exaggerate. The cubist mode allows me to interweave different views and realities. The increasing illusion of space gives these constructed forms body and presence.

The Portrait Is Not Bound to the Human Face

I paint portraits. Yet for me, portraiture is not limited to the depiction of a human being.

A quince, too, can possess individuality. An animal can become a presence. An object can carry memory. A group can embody a social condition. A demonstration can appear as a collective organism. Liberty can take form.

I do not merely paint what something looks like. I am interested in the presence it develops.

In the individual portrait, this presence condenses in a single being. In the group painting, it emerges between the figures. The soul of a constellation belongs to no individual. It reveals itself in gazes, gestures, distances, roles, conflicts and shared movements.

“Café Künstlerbrot”, “Die Demo” and “Liberty” are therefore portraits as well: portraits of a society, a situation or an idea at work.

The presence facing us need not be a single being. An entire painting can confront us.

From Object to Presence

An object is something we can recognise, classify or use. A presence eludes our complete command. It possesses an agency of its own and acts back upon us.

I paint the moment when something ceases to be merely an object.

Painting does not simply add a soul to things. It asks whether what we consider silent and motionless may not already possess a hidden agency.

Perhaps ensoulment is therefore not a quality that belongs to an individual object. Perhaps it arises in relationship: between figure and space, between the figures in a painting, between visible form and inner imagination—and finally between the painting and the viewer.

Presence emerges where looking becomes encounter.

I Do Not Paint an Answer

I do not know whether the visible world is the expression of a deeper, creative consciousness.

I do not know whether matter, energy, space and time arise from a common origin.

I do not know whether the world we take to be real is only the form in which our consciousness can experience a more encompassing reality.

But I keep these questions open.

My painting is not intended to illustrate a metaphysical doctrine. It is not meant to feign a certainty I do not possess. It is an attempt to encounter the visible world until its apparent unambiguity begins to fracture.

The painting becomes a threshold between outward perception and inner reality.